Monday, March 27, 2017

Mark 1:35

Mark 1:35

“And rising very early in the morning, while it was still
dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there He prayed.”

Its pretty well known that I don’t like mornings. My poor
family had to deal with it for almost 18 years as each morning I would wake up
and glare at anyone who tried to have a conversation with me. My mom once told
me that everyone had decided to not talk to me for the first hour after I came
out of my room. Yikes. Honestly, it’s the dumbest thing. I mean, what reason do
I really have to wake up and immediately be mad? The Lord’s mercies are new
every morning and that alone is reason to have a good attitude about being
awake. But if I’m being totally honest, I think the biggest reason why I hated
mornings so much was because of their focus on me. I didn’t want to wake up, so
I snoozed my alarm as many times as possible. I didn’t want to face the
responsibilities of that day so I stayed in bed until I absolutely could not
avoid getting up. I didn’t want to be real with people so I used social media
as a way of escape before I even got out of bed. The list could go on, but
that’d be boring. My point is that my mornings were so filled with self that I
could never just enjoy the life the Lord gave me. The joy I should have had
wasn’t there simply because my eyes were on myself and not my Lord. Doing a
devo every day was a habit before Ignite, but it was never ever done early in
the morning. Ever. And considering that in my house, 7 people live together,
“desolate place” is a foreign concept to me. No matter which room you’re in, at
least one other person could walk in at any second. However, since being in
Ignite, the Lord has been changing my heart towards mornings. While I still
don’t like them and would rather start my day later, I now see value in being
up early in order to spend time with the Lord. For any reason other than being
with Jesus, I still think being up early is dumb. But like I said, there is
value in waking up to spend time with the Lord before your day starts and the
benefits of that far outweigh the cost of losing some sleep.